Growing concerns
Apr. 12th, 2010 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Today my mum took me and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
addedentry to a garden centre and bought us an apple tree (a Worcester Pearmain), as well as some other smaller tasty plants (tomatoes, peppers, and blueberry bushes). Digging a hole big enough for even such a tiny tree takes a surprising amount of time and effort. We also planted the hazel sapling from my parents' garden; meanwhile, the hawthorn saplings cleanskies gave us are flourishing. We are literally putting down roots here.
The eventual plan for the garden is that everything should be edible; the main exceptions at the moment are the daffodils, crocuses, and rather lurid primulas which we planted hastily to stop the garden looking quite so much like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (it worked!), though our definition of 'edible' includes anything Richard Mabey thinks you can eat, which allows quite a lot of leeway.
The best thing about the garden, though, is that we have a BADGER! OK, we've only actually seen it in next door's garden, not ours (we've seen a fox and a hedgehog in ours, though) but given the mess it's made of theirs I'm quite happy with that. I tried to get a photo but you can only really tell it's a badger if you already know. But, really, an ACTUAL LIVE BADGER!
We've definitely made more progress with the garden than with the house; while the garden's growing, the house is falling down. OK, that's a slight exaggeration: it's suffering from a small amount of subsidence, which has caused cracks to appear all over the place. The buildings insurance people think this is a) probably due to defective drains (as opposed to, say, tunnelling badgers), and b) probably not covered by our insurance because we were sort of warned that it was a possibility in the survey. It has taken them weeks and weeks to do anything, and we're still waiting for the results of the investigation of the drains. I was horribly worried about it at first, and it certainly added to the general hiding-under-a-rock stress; but you can't sustain that level of worry for this long, and the house hasn't actually fallen down, so now I am just wishing they would hurry up and tell us how much it will cost.
The subsidence does mean that pretty much everything else to do with the inside of the house is suffering from planning blight, though; realistically, we weren't going to have redecorated everything by now (my parents still haven't redecorated everything in their house, and they've lived there for 24 years now), but we were hoping to get started on sorting out the kitchen. We still don't have an oven, but it's not a big deal. Maybe we don't need an oven after all (at least two people now have said we should get a Remoska instead). It would feel slightly odd making a deliberate choice not to have an oven, to get the kitchen refitted without leaving room for one; but probably no odder than it would feel to a lot of people not to have a TV.
On the other hand, not having a TV doesn't really mean it's impossible to watch TV; it's just impossible to watch it live. We watched the whole first series of Glee (if you don't know what Glee is -- and given that I don't often watch TV, I don't take it for granted that everybody knows about every TV show -- then the Wikipedia entry will explain with no spoilers above the fold) suffering the indignity of being a week behind the rest of the UK because 4OD didn't release the episodes until they'd shown the repeat. Episodes! Repeats! Things I hadn't thought about at all since I last watched TV regularly, back in the late 1990s. I tried to persuadeaddedentry to do the bittorrent thing so we could get the next episodes quicker, but he wouldn't, and I don't know how (honestly! I've just never done it). We also watched the first episode of the new Dr Who (it is probably internet heresy to say that I don't really get Dr Who, but, well) despite nearly being put off by the utterly rubbish bit with the food at the beginning.
There's lots of other things I want to write about but I don't really know where to start, and more and more I feel as though LiveJournal isn't really the place to write about them, because I feel like I don't know anybody here very well any more. I don't have real conversations with very many people any more at all, and that's my fault for not being good at keeping up friendships, but it still feels like I've retreated into a dark empty room somehow and I don't quite know how to come back to the party, because everything is elsewhere, and I'm not totally sure that it wouldn't be better just to slip away home in the dark without another word.
addedentry to a garden centre and bought us an apple tree (a Worcester Pearmain), as well as some other smaller tasty plants (tomatoes, peppers, and blueberry bushes). Digging a hole big enough for even such a tiny tree takes a surprising amount of time and effort. We also planted the hazel sapling from my parents' garden; meanwhile, the hawthorn saplings cleanskies gave us are flourishing. We are literally putting down roots here. The eventual plan for the garden is that everything should be edible; the main exceptions at the moment are the daffodils, crocuses, and rather lurid primulas which we planted hastily to stop the garden looking quite so much like a post-apocalyptic wasteland (it worked!), though our definition of 'edible' includes anything Richard Mabey thinks you can eat, which allows quite a lot of leeway.
The best thing about the garden, though, is that we have a BADGER! OK, we've only actually seen it in next door's garden, not ours (we've seen a fox and a hedgehog in ours, though) but given the mess it's made of theirs I'm quite happy with that. I tried to get a photo but you can only really tell it's a badger if you already know. But, really, an ACTUAL LIVE BADGER!
We've definitely made more progress with the garden than with the house; while the garden's growing, the house is falling down. OK, that's a slight exaggeration: it's suffering from a small amount of subsidence, which has caused cracks to appear all over the place. The buildings insurance people think this is a) probably due to defective drains (as opposed to, say, tunnelling badgers), and b) probably not covered by our insurance because we were sort of warned that it was a possibility in the survey. It has taken them weeks and weeks to do anything, and we're still waiting for the results of the investigation of the drains. I was horribly worried about it at first, and it certainly added to the general hiding-under-a-rock stress; but you can't sustain that level of worry for this long, and the house hasn't actually fallen down, so now I am just wishing they would hurry up and tell us how much it will cost.
The subsidence does mean that pretty much everything else to do with the inside of the house is suffering from planning blight, though; realistically, we weren't going to have redecorated everything by now (my parents still haven't redecorated everything in their house, and they've lived there for 24 years now), but we were hoping to get started on sorting out the kitchen. We still don't have an oven, but it's not a big deal. Maybe we don't need an oven after all (at least two people now have said we should get a Remoska instead). It would feel slightly odd making a deliberate choice not to have an oven, to get the kitchen refitted without leaving room for one; but probably no odder than it would feel to a lot of people not to have a TV.
On the other hand, not having a TV doesn't really mean it's impossible to watch TV; it's just impossible to watch it live. We watched the whole first series of Glee (if you don't know what Glee is -- and given that I don't often watch TV, I don't take it for granted that everybody knows about every TV show -- then the Wikipedia entry will explain with no spoilers above the fold) suffering the indignity of being a week behind the rest of the UK because 4OD didn't release the episodes until they'd shown the repeat. Episodes! Repeats! Things I hadn't thought about at all since I last watched TV regularly, back in the late 1990s. I tried to persuade
addedentry to do the bittorrent thing so we could get the next episodes quicker, but he wouldn't, and I don't know how (honestly! I've just never done it). We also watched the first episode of the new Dr Who (it is probably internet heresy to say that I don't really get Dr Who, but, well) despite nearly being put off by the utterly rubbish bit with the food at the beginning.There's lots of other things I want to write about but I don't really know where to start, and more and more I feel as though LiveJournal isn't really the place to write about them, because I feel like I don't know anybody here very well any more. I don't have real conversations with very many people any more at all, and that's my fault for not being good at keeping up friendships, but it still feels like I've retreated into a dark empty room somehow and I don't quite know how to come back to the party, because everything is elsewhere, and I'm not totally sure that it wouldn't be better just to slip away home in the dark without another word.
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 09:47 am (UTC)a bad idea to use electricity for heating
Why's that? Are you saying that if/when we do get an oven, a gas oven would be better? (Definitely getting a gas hob - at the moment we are making do with one of those portable electric one-ring things - but I found gas ovens seemed to cook a bit unevenly... OTOH those were shitty gas ovens in rented houses, so, hm.)
It's such a minefield, though, and after a while I start thinking "well, it'd be easier if we didn't eat". :-{
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 10:01 am (UTC)That said, we still have an electric oven. Gas hob and gas heating but yeah. Electric ovens are just generally swifter and more even in my opinion.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:06 am (UTC)Also, if you actually care about CO2 emissions rather than energy usage, then the story for electricity becomes rather more complicated.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:27 am (UTC)Cooking on a gas hob seems more efficient than electric because you don't have to leave it on for ages before it gets hot enough to do anything, but I'm not claiming that that means it is more efficient in terms of anything except my time/patience. And there are certainly better electric hobs out there than the one we've got.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:36 am (UTC)Re the hob, it'd be pretty hard to measure the efficiency difference, especially since the answer will be different in winter to summer (in winter the waste heat has some use since you'd be heating your house anyway).
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:42 am (UTC)in winter the waste heat has some use since you'd be heating your house anyway
If I admit that we didn't actually go and turn the heating off whenever we turned the hob on over the winter, that's probably tantamount to admitting to raping polar bears, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 11:49 am (UTC)If I admit that we didn't actually go and turn the heating off whenever we turned the hob on over the winter, that's probably tantamount to admitting to raping polar bears, isn't it?
Only if you don't have a thermostat to do it for you, which is unlikely :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:43 pm (UTC)Wind is unlikely ever to form a substantial portion of our energy mix; it's not that bursty over the whole country, and we can easily handle burstiness in a small portion of the mix - modern hydro can be turned on and off extremely quickly, for example, making it ideal for covering over the gaps.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 12:18 pm (UTC)A gas oven with a fan should cook more evenly than a gas oven without, surely?
(What
"well, it'd be easier if we didn't eat"
Nonono, you just get takeaways instead. And then you get to moralistically condemn the takeaway people for using so much more energy than you ;-)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:05 pm (UTC)One of our fellow lowcarbonistas in Oxford wants to (re)introduce community ovens. Perhaps I could argue for the economies of scale of takeaways?
no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-12 02:36 pm (UTC)